How do you focus best? What specific tools, techniques, places, or people make it happen?

Are you building those supports into your day-to-day?

What will it look like when you achieve these goals? How will you know they've been achieved?

I'm a little bit happy and a little bit not happy to sit down and write this retrospective. Largely, those two emotions are connected to the same fact: I really haven't thought about my goals for the last three weeks of class.

My hope was that I would spend my last three weeks of class learning a technology that I would need in my future job.

With that in mind - I've actually decided to start asking these questions in interviews:

In the next few weeks, we get to work on a mastery project. If you had three weeks to spend all day every day working on something, and were in a building full of developers who would answer your questions - what would you want to focus on learning?

And what do you think would help someone get a head start in your company?

How do you focus best?

I focus best when I'm solving an actual problem and seeing a result. I now know that I retain virtually nothing when I sit down and do things on Codacademy. Not that the classes aren't great, they are, but they're done in a literal box that doesn't connect to any real world application.

I also need some kind of background noise to focus. And I need human interaction. Coffee shops are great. Working in class has been great.

Are you building those supports into your day-to-day?

I haven't been, but I should.

Since I find human interaction to be important to my focus, I think it would be important to keep a network of people that I can reach out to randomly to say 'HELP JESUS GOD HELP ME I'M IN A CODE NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO ESCAPE"

What will it look like when you achieve these goals? How will you know they've been achieved?

I am looking at the Mastery Project as a barometer for success. To me, I think success will look like my presenting something that grabs the class's attention without the heavy use of gifs. That means that I did something that hasn't been shown before and did it well enough to present something.

I'm taking the courses in order to backfill my understanding of the hows, whys and pitfalls in data analysis. The courses also happen to be in R, which is a language I have literally never used in my day job.